Convert More Web Visitors to App Downloads

Brian Clark (Guest Author)May 13, 2015

In building a landing page for your mobile app you should have three main things: what your app does, a prominent call to action so a visitor will download it, and a simple way for that user to get the app. If a user doesn’t end up downloading your app then the landing page is utterly useless.

This can be critical for getting the most out of your marketing channels. When you pour money into ads, content marketing, or more, you want to make sure that if users visit your website, you make it as easy as possible to convert them to an app install.

For the most part, app developers have learned how to make well performing landing pages to convert users to installs and there are many blog posts out there on that. One area they tend to forget though, is efficiently bridging the desktop to mobile conversion.

There are many options or methods for your users to try to get the app onto their device from visiting the landing page on their desktop. However, there is no built in, seamless way to get the user from your landing page in their desktop browser to installing it on their device. For Android devices you can initiate an over-the-air install from the Google Play store website, but on iOS there isn’t any easy way.

A great solution to this problem is putting a text-to-download form on your landing page. Then your users can easily type in their phone number, send them self a text message with a link to your app, and download it immediately.

What’s great about SMS is that open rates are over 98% and app developers have reported a noticeable increase in desktop to mobile conversion with a text-to-download form. You can also leverage an AppsFlyer OneLink and determine if the user that visited your website and texted them self a link actually installed the app. In order to optimize your desktop to mobile conversion, a text-to-download form is a must.

Below we’ve detailed the steps you can use to create an AppsFlyer OneLink that attributes installs to text-to-download, and services you can use to put a text-to-download form on your website.

Creating a Custom AppsFlyer OneLink

AppsFlyer’s OneLink technology can create a custom link that will detect your user’s device type and send them to the appropriate app store. OneLink will also attribute the source of the download (Ad, Twitter, Text-To-Download) if configured properly.

You will want to create one to specifically measure a text-to-download form.

Add your iOS and Android apps to AppsFlyer (if you have launched on both app stores) then go to settings of eitherClick on “Configure OneLink”

Connect the iOS and Android apps together (again if you have both) and set a fallback website

Set the media source to LinkTexting for the text to download, enable OneLink, enable multi platform if you’re on multiple devices, then click on “Shorten Link”

Congratulations! You’ve created a custom OneLink that can be used to attribute your download back to a text-to-download solution.

Building the Text-to-Download Form

Once you’ve created your link that will attribute a download/install to your text-to-download channel, you’ll want to create a text to download form on your website so your users can text them self a message like “Get our amazing app here! http://m.onelink.me/be3a29se”.

To implement a text-to-download form you can use Plivo, Twilio or another SMS API to handle the SMS messaging. You’ll need a backend-engineer that can then spin up a server, integrate with the SMS api, and a front-end engineer build a phone number validation form, design it, then finally place it on the website.

This process should take your engineering team around 12-24 hours to complete the basic implementation. To support all of your users if you have an international app is adding a dropdown to your form that allows a user to select their country for international support. if you are sending over a couple hundred text messages in a day you’ll want to own multiple phone numbers and rotate between them so the carriers don’t mark you as spam.

Make Sure to Optimize Your Text-to-Download Form

Once you have built and deployed your text-to-download form, it’s very important to consider the placement on your website. The example below illustrates the best location, putting it near or close to the app store logos and towards the top of your website, is very important.

If your website has other calls to action, for instance near the bottom of the page, on a pricing page, or at the end of content marketing on your blog, that would also be a great spot to put other text-to-download forms to optimize your conversion rate.

Short on Engineering Time? Use LinkTexting!

If you don’t have the time or expertise available to build this yourself, you can check out LinkTexting, which allows you to generate a text-to-download form and place it on your website in minutes instead of days!

Conversion is important, make sure you get the most of out your landing page!

About the Author

Brian Clark (@blaurenceclark) is a co-founder of LinkTexting, helping apps get more downloads. He has been a developer for 12 years, working in mobile, analytics and BI for the past 5 years at companies ranging from Fortune 10 to two person startups